Thanks for hosting the contest! This was a really interesting level with a lot of possible approaches.
A lot of variety in the solutions that people submitted, too. The right half seemed to be pretty much the
same for everyone (with two variations to rescue the top hatch both taking up the same amount of skills),
but the left half really was very open-ended.

Somehow I discarded the idea of going below as well as my mind is not conditioned to basher staircases anymore
after they were culled from Lix long ago. I was also surprised of the hang gliders clipping through terrain and
landing in the little nook when digging at the right side of the girder above the exit, especially in consideration
of the strangely sensitive foot check for builders.


One musing for the next contest: It could be interesting to score by minimum skills first, with maximum saved
only as the tiebreaker (and maybe discard time as second tiebreaker to save people tedious micro-optimizing).
I think this might make things more open-ended as it's not a priori clear what's the least amount of skills possible
(while it's often easy to determine the maximum amount of lemmings that can be saved), and even once you've
settled for a number of skills, it's probably still less clear what's the total number of lemmings that can be saved
with that amount of skills.

I started playing this pack to bring back some nostalgia...
Insane Steve's Cheapo levels were the first big pack I was playing, and I remember it taking me months to complete most of it, with individual levels haunting me for even longer. I still remember my fascination with the Mon0lith, and I'm happy to see it as the final level of the pack.
Thanks a lot for compiling this!

I went through Difficult and Chaotic so far. I forgot a decent amount of solutions, yet at the same time it's surprising that for some levels that I played over 10 years ago I still have a faint memory of some main tricks. Though I think the main reason for being much fast than ~12 years ago is that I also got a lot better since then.

A few comments on individual levels so far:

I'd also prefer Saturday. Sunday might be possible, but can't say for sure.

Anyone interested in playing tomorrow?

I'd also be up for Ultimate Chicken Horse instead.

I'm not free the coming weekend.

Regarding glitches, I'm fine with whatever rules; even anything goes is fine with me (I barely know any glitches anyway).

If you want glitchless, I think most cases are pretty clear-cut, but there's always little corner cases. Same in Lemmings. What is common sense? I remember long time ago it wasn't clear whether turning a digger with a blocker is a glitch or trick. What is "against the spirit" of the game? Are backroutes in Lemmings against the spirit?
That said, I don't really care, I'm not that good anyway. If everyone goes by their own common sense then things probably mostly align and anyone who's not super competitive will be fine (anyone who is considering using anything in particular unsure about could just ask what people think). There's also useless minor glitches one might trigger by accident (e.g. sprite glitches like jumping up next to a button somewhere in Labyrinth zone makes you jump in the walking sprite), I'm sure you don't want to disqualify people for that. So yeah, I'm not too serious about having clear rules here as I don't really care about the results that much.

Either way, if we start with Sonic 1 Simon posted the rules for the glitchless category.
So these could just serve as our rules, if we need that. Maybe you also want to take out going over the top of the level in Spring Yard?

I'd be interested in such a race, might be difficult to schedule across timezones though with me being away on weekends quite often. I only know S1, S2, S3K and Sonic CD (played through Sonic Mania once, but don't have any recording set up on Windows).

Fixing a character in advance seems to make sense to me (in S3K then there's also the question if it's Sonic, should it be Sonic+Tails and if so, can you have input on the second controller to e.g. lift up Sonic through the level? Probably not). Glitches are heavily abused in the runs, but then (I presume?) we're amateurs and most of them are too tough to learn quickly and pull off reliably anyway, so trying them in a run would be more of a gamble than a sure advantage, which can be fun too. (I think in past S3K races even between pros skipping a bunch of glitches was often the better strategy in the end than being stuck trying to pull of a glitch). And I'm pretty sure any of us would lose clearly to the pros in a glitchless run as well, unless I'm underestimating you guys.

Surprisingly for such a small level, Forestidia's solution is a backroute (which might have made it more fiddly than necessary). I'll fix it by increasing the spawn interval a little and post an update. Nepster's solution is intended, modulo a minor difference which I don't care too much about.
Icho's solutions are the same as the Forestidia's and Nepster's solution.

I've solved Proxima's level. Wasn't immediately obvious (also, the fall looks a bit like a splat fall due to the large zoom), but I managed. Nice one.